ealous in promoting the
most violent measures of the first Assembly, pressed earnestly on Petion
that his duty as mayor bound him to call out the National Guards, and so
prevent the intended outbreak, but was answered by sarcasms and insults;
while Vergniaud, from the tribune of the Assembly itself, dared to deride
all who apprehended danger.

On the morning of the 20th, daylight had scarcely dawned when twenty
thousand men, the greater part of whom were armed with some weapon or
other--muskets, pikes, hatchets, crowbars, and even spits from the
cook-shops forming part of their equipment--assembled on the place where
the Bastile had stood. Santerre was already there on horseback as their
appointed leader; and, when all were collected and marshaled in three
divisions, they began their march. One division had for its chief the
Marquis de St. Huruge, an intimate friend and adherent of the Duc
d'Orleans; at the head of another, a woman of notorious infamy, known as
La Belle Liegeoise, clad in male attire, rode astride upon a cannon;
while, as it advanced, the crowd was every moment swelled by vast bodies
of recruits, among whom were numbers of women, whose imprecations in
ferocity and foulness surpassed even the foulest threats of the men.

The ostensible object of the procession was to present petitions to the
king and the Assembly on the dismissal of Roland and his colleagues from
the administration, and on the refusal of the royal assent to the decree
against the priests. The real design of those who had organized it was
more truthfully shown by the banners and emblems borne aloft in the ranks.
"Beware the Lamp,[1]" was the inscription on one. "Death to Veto and his
wife," was read upon another. A gang of butchers carried a calf's heart on
the point of a pike, with "The Heart of an Aristocrat" for a motto. A band
of crossing-sweepers, or of men who professed to be such, though the
fineness of their linen was inconsistent with the rags which were their
outward garments, had for their standard a pair of ragged breeches, with
the inscription, "Tremble, tyrants; here are the Sans-culottes." One gang
of ruffians carried a model of a guillotine. Another bore aloft a
miniature gallows with an effigy of the queen herself hanging from it. So
great was the crowd that it was nearly three in the afternoon before the
head of it reached the Assembly, where its approach had raised a debate on
the propriety of receiving any petition at